As I type this first line, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is my least favorite Foo Fighters release. Even though I own every CD they’ve put out and have shelled out cash money to see them perform in a big cement thud factory like the Long Beach Arena, I’ve got to clearly state this isn’t based upon any intellectual evaluation, track by track analyzation or CD by CD comparison. I just haven’t played it as much as I have their past releases. I come back to it regularly, and that’s a good sign, but I haven’t been captivated as yet.

Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace starts off in fighting Foo fashion with “The Pretender,” a sublime piece of music that lures you in with a Downy bear soft verse before breaking into pile driver rock that makes you want to recklessly gun your 1964 Ford Galaxy 500 through the rain-soaked streets of Long Beach. It then slashes your brake lines with one of the catchiest sing-along choruses in Foo history until, naturally, you’re slammed to an abrupt halt.

And Echoes ends with Dave Grohl at a piano singing “Home,” which is, as the Black Crowes said, “… another road song.” It’s a lovely waltz-time ballad which will pull at the emotions of anyone who has ever wanted to just be home. “People I’ve loved/I have no regrets/Some I remember/some I forget/Some of them living/some of them dead/Al I want is to be home.” If you’ve been stranded away from home, and the night seemed darker than any you can remember, this song will resonate deep in your gut and brain.

It’s everything between those two cuts that has me confused. It’s
highly possible that this is one of those grow-on-you albums, and maybe
one of these times I’ll put it on repeat and enjoy the holy crap out of
it, but that hasn’t happened yet and I’ve been living with it for a
couple of weeks now.

It seems as if ESP&G is saturated in the Foo’s trademark slow to
fast, hard to soft, quirky bridge songwriting sensibilities. And maybe
therein lies my problem … trademark. You’re most successful when you
write within your own ethos (ask John Fogerty) but sometimes those
sensibilities can begin to resemble an OCD compulsion to repeat
yourself. I think Grohl, being a talented and smart songwriter,
recognizes it as well, and that’s the reason for the inclusion of the
acoustic “Stranger Things Have Happened” and finger-pickin’ Led Zep
III-ish “Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners.” Then again, I also think
the successful acoustic tour and CD might have helped him with that
decision. The point is, this record sounds very Foo Fighters but still
hasn’t captivated me enough to call my friends and tell them to run out
and pick it up.

There are points of pure rock splendor on ESP&G. Grohl’s screaming
vocals at the end of “Let It Die” are Plastic Ono Band fantastic. And
it’s easy to imagine how the repeating figure at the end of “Come
Alive” will lead to venue-shaking and screams for one more encore. And
just in general, Grohl writes hooks so thick you could catch large
mouth bass with them and, come to think of it, Taylor Hawkins’
explosive drumming demonstrates why DG gave up the throne. As a matter
of fact, as the CD’s finishing its second consecutive spin today, I
realize that there are a lot more PoPRS (Points of Pure Rock Splendor
-- I think I’m going to trademark that) on ESP&G than I’d realized.

The George Harrison-esque guitar solo at the 2:40 mark of “Long Road to
Ruin” is pretty damn amazing, and “Summer’s End” has a very Neil-like
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere feel until it slides into a pop chorus
that could have been written in 1967. I’m starting to dig Echoes more
and more. Hold on for a few minutes will you?

Okay, now I’m in the middle of the third consecutive spin and I’m
reevaluating it right in the middle of writing a review. Did I already
mention my confusion? I read the liner notes again and discovered
ESP&G was produced by Gil Norton, who also did The Colour and the
Shape, not only my favorite Foo but on my list of All-Time CDs. And if
I remember correctly (and, damn it, I do), I didn’t really get that one
either and I felt like a turd after it’d been in heavy rotation on my
stereo for a good five months and I’d already convinced a few friends
to lay off of it. So now I have to ask myself if there’s a “February
Stars” on ESP&G … but I still don’t know.

I guess what this means is that Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
may now be my least favorite Foo Fighters album, but it doesn’t mean
it’s going to stay that way. How I feel about it right now doesn’t
really mean crap, because it’s really good and growing on me like mold
on stinky cheese. And I happen to like stinky cheese. It’s an acquired
taste that grows on you over time. And eventually you find it
captivating. Hmm, I think I’ve got a few friends to call. They’ve got
to get Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.

Sound
My biggest beef (to go along with that stinky cheese) with Echoes is
the mixing and mastering. It sparkles at times but sounds highly
compressed at others. Primarily, when the music is soft it’s bright and
spacious but when the band unleashes the rock beast it becomes very
dense, and the articulation of the instruments becomes negligible. The
various voices are recorded incredibly well without any (at least as
far as I can tell) of the pitch correction artifacts that you hear on
all of the “big hit” releases these days.

Echoes sounds really good on my car stereo, to the point where I may
have blown a speaker (or two). In my confused state I decided to do a
sound comparison by purchasing a cut from the new Alter Bridge release
Blackbird and then playing a cut from Echoes right after it. I repeated
this a few times and decided that if the sound production on Echoes is
stinky cheese then the flat muck of Blackbird is a wiener. And we know
what wieners are made out of.